Faculty

Walter K. Lew

Walter K. Lew is the author of: Excerpts from: ΔIKTH DIKTE for DICTEE (1982) (1992), Treadwinds: Poems & Intermedia Texts (2002), The Ga-guhm Poems (forthcoming). He edited Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (1995), Muae 1 (1995), and Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple: The Poems of Frances Chung (2000), and was co-editor with Heinz Insu Fenkl of Kôri: The Beacon Anthology of Korean American Fiction (2001). Treadwinds (Wesleyan Poetry Series) received the Sixth Annual Literary Award of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and was a finalist for the 2003 PEN Center USA award for poetry. Lew has performed his multimedia “movietelling” pieces at numerous international film festivals and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, NY State Council on the Arts, Korean Culture and Arts Foundatin, and Association for Asian Studies, among others. Current projects: collection of poetry and scientific writing titled Deux ou trois sciences que j’ai lu d’elle; The Selected Works of Yi Sang (compiler and translator from the Korean); a multimedia piece on the career and work of the novelist Younghill Kang.

Life philosophy:  "Where is someone who has forgotten words so that I can have a word with him?" —Chuang tzu

Teaching Statement:

Whether in the classroom or through the influence of one’s writing, insightful teaching is one of a mature author’s most important responsibilities. At the minimum, the teaching writer, skilled at discriminating between freshly and insensitively articulated language, helps students to perceive and honor innovation and vitality. The various aesthetics and techniques I teach all aim to cultivate a richer sense of the dynamics and luminous details of writing praxes, histories, and cultures, both distant and present.

My courses simultaneously convey traditions and rearticulate dilemmas writers face in the present. This often requires the study of material outside of what is normally defined as “literature,” such as architecture, film, music, philosophy, and the natural and social sciences. It is crucial to expose students to ways of crafting and enacting relations to the world that have become obscured in our daily lives.

The further away a model is from current standards of poetry, the more daring a foray the student must make to follow/integrate it into new poems. And to embed that writing in a more resonant life. In fact, the poet must often leave “poetry” to return to it in a more profound practice (enmeshed in a different skein of grammatologies).

Through what has been called “reciprocal teaching,” other cultural potentials are discovered “there” in one’s students—their knowledge of, for instance, religion, local bands, workplaces and their routines, child-rearing, hometown history, other languages, ancestral legacies, and technical skills, whether they be in masonry, weaving, or sound technology.

In addition to poetry, I have worked as an editor, publisher, TV journalist and documentary producer, cognitive science researcher, literary scholar and translator, and multimedia artist and performer. These experiences influence how I teach the diverse groups of students that have taken my courses. In workshops, students read both Anglophone and translated poetry that alters their notions of writing, such as site-specific installations, collaborative linked verse, collage, religious texts that integrate prayer and icons, and the work of multimedia authors, performers, or filmmakers like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Chris Marker, and the movietellers (live narrators of film, called pyônsa in Korean) that prospered during the silent film era. I encourage students to both critique and make use of basic presentation and media arts software like PowerPoint and iMovie. To engage new levels of meaning and expand students’ linguistic skills and subjects, I assign exercises in unusual prosodies and forms of symbolization, and urge students to combine their writing with translation, scientific organizations of data, and the writing of their classmates.

To enrich the critical dimension of their writing and models, other exercises extend treatises ranging from Buddhist dialectics, Bauhaus, and the Frankfurt School to the writings of Chuang tzu, Blake, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Karatani. Students also practice traditional verse forms and read poets drawn from across the spectrum of classical and pre-modern poetics, such as Lucretius, Lu Chi, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Creative writing should also be a mode of sensing, remembering, investigating, and reformulation for students not majoring in literature. I recommend the use of creative writing assignments in studio art, survey, history, or theory courses as well—wherever our ways of making marks in the world (whether aural, inscribed, gestural, screened) need reviving.